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Julius Caesar Violence Essay

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Violence in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar “Liberty”! Freedom. Tyranny is dead!” is what Cinna cried while Julius Caesar died from his stab wounds, but did the conspirators really kill Tyranny (III.i.86)? Did their actions liberate the Romans? They did not, in fact, free Rome. William Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is a play about one of history’s most famous assassinations, and its aftermath. It focuses less on Julius Caesar. Instead, Shakespeare focuses more on the conspirators who killed him, and how they failed in their endeavors because of their violent acts. It proves that the use of violence to try to change things for the better is doomed to fail. The driving cause for the assassination of Caesar was to restore Rome to its past perfection, but there never was a perfect …show more content…

He made Brutus believe that he was meant to do this. However, the Roman republic they were trying to protect never functioned as it should have. Kahn states that “instead, the Republic fostered the division of the aristocracy into factions and the rise of military superheroes whose armies were loyal to them rather than to the Republic.” Caesar could be considered a military superhero, one who felt like a threat to any power Cassius and the other conspirators held. Additionally, Caesar becoming king would emasculate them. Kahn notes that “in terms of the Republic, to be a Roman means to be gendered male,” by this they mean that males were the ones who held political power and engaged in public affairs, while women stayed at home. The less power and influence a man had, the less masculine he was

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